CHAPTER VI 



AROUND THE YEAR WITH COTTON GROWERS 



THE INDUSTRIAL routine of any group of workers 

 forms the skeleton on which the living flesh of their social 

 life is developed. To the diurnal, weekly, seasonal, and 

 annual cycles, the community, civic, recreational, and 

 even familial routine of the worker must conform. Thus 

 a highly informing study of any human group would be 

 found in charting its diurnal rounds. The typical daily 

 record of a factory worker, an office girl, and a modern 

 business executive would furnish significant data for so- 

 ciological analysis. An annual record of the routine of 

 the agricultural worker, a wheat farmer, a cattle ranch- 

 man, a truck grower, would be pertinent in that it would 

 show variations in economic and social life due to the sea- 

 sons. In his The Peasants: Autumn, Winter, Spring, and 

 Summer, Reymont has depicted this cycle of the routines 

 of Polish folk life with the graphic method of fiction. 

 Such a study, it must be admitted, possesses descriptive 

 value. It serves to enfold the abstract and generalized 

 terms by which the economist describes the industrial 

 processes with the warm reality of the cultural and social 

 practices which accompany them. 



It is suggested, accordingly, that a study of the men 

 who tend cotton should also be a record of days and 

 works as interrelated with cycles of the seasons. This 

 chapter deals, then, with the routine, the movements, and 

 processes of the human factors in cotton. The patterns 



